Introduction

Introduction feels like a mediation on how time chips away at first impressions: What started as something beautiful and simple can become complicated, unattainable, and hard to hold on to.

There's very little substance, with only a meager bit of exposition providing any kind of throughline, yet the film confounds in its modest ambitions.

Another of the writer-director's sharp, elegant miniatures.

It's a taste worth acquiring.

The battle of the generations is fought passive-aggressively in this spare, wry, yet bitter drama by Hong Sangsoo.

Slight and discursive even by the filmmaker's idiosyncratic standards, "Introduction" refuses to auto-correct for anyone who doesn't already speak conversational Hong.

Simply a series of gatherings, which lead to conversations, which in turn lead to a gentle revelation about its central character.

Even die-hard fans of the idiosyncratic South Korean auteur are likely to find this slight and sluggish film patience-testing.

Enough cigarettes burned in the film to fill a three-hour epic.

Hong's films are seemingly guided by the faith that ... discomfort can ripen with comic pleasure and, if you look hard enough, shiver with the profound.